Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” (Finneran 108). Yeats implied that Irish freedom fighters, such as O’Leary, have died in vain. He also inferred that there were no longer any people who were willing to fight for Ireland:Yet they were of a different kind,The names that stilled your childish play,They have gone about the world like wind, (Finneran 108)The contemporary Roman Catholic middle classes had defeated the cause for which Yeats fought for at that time; hence Yeats felt oppressed by his own people. (Abram 2303)The theme of social division appeared in “September 1913” because Yeats detested the middle classes and their Philistine money grabbing (Abrams 2303) as describe in the first three lines: What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy tillAnd add the halfpence to the pence (Finneran 108)To Yeats, the middle classes had forgotten their own history. They insulted the memories of the Irish heroes who fought for freedom and the rights to be Catholic. Through this poem, Yeats suggested that the middle classes only cared about money, not the freedom of their country. He tended to romanticize the aristocracy and peasants but hated the middle classes for their indifference to Ireland. (Abrams 2303) Yeats also implied that because of the selfishness, they made everything meaningless, destroying the romantic Ireland.In contrast, the poems “To Ireland in the Coming Times” and “Easter 1916” carried the theme of unity. In the former poem, Yeats said, “That you, in the dim coming times, / May know how my heart went with them” (Finneran 51). He was saying that his dreams for Ireland would live on even when he was dead. Yeats wrote the latter poem after the Easter Rebellion. (Abrams 2307) It expressed the theme of unity by Yeats’s action of returning to Ireland and reconciling with the middle classes. T...
